Rather a bad poem, but the kind of bad poem I like better than many good poems: Sea Change by John Masefield

"Goneys an' gullies an' all o' the birds o' the sea
They ain't no birds, not really", said Billy the Dane.
"Not mollies, nor gullies, nor goneys at all", said he,
"But simply the spirits of mariners livin' again."

"Them birds goin' fishin' is nothin' but the souls o' the drowned,
Souls o' the drowned, an' the kicked as are never no more
An' that there haughty old albatross cruisin' around,
Belike he's Admiral Nelson or Admiral Noah."

"An' merry's the life they are living. They settle and dip,
They fishes, they never stands watches, they waggle their wings;
When a ship comes by, they fly to look at the ship
To see how the nowaday mariners manages things."

"When freezing aloft in a snorter I tell you I wish -
(Though maybe it ain't like a Christian) - I wish I could be
A haughty old copper-bound albatross dipping for fish
And coming the proud over all o' the birds o' the sea."

 Cuttlefish pass marshmallow test

To examine whether cuttlefish could delay gratification for a better reward, researchers (Schnell et al. 2021) offered them an Asian shore crab (a less preferred food) immediately, or a grass shrimp (a more preferred food) if they were able to wait. The food was offered in two chambers with sliding doors. Before the test, cuttlefish were trained to recognize symbols on the doors that indicated if it would open immediately (a circle) or with a delay (a triangle). Most of the cuttlefish waited 50 to 130 seconds to get the more desirable grass shrimp, comparable to time delays shown by chimpanzees and crows.

Depth perception in cuttlefish:

“Not only did the [team] provide compelling evidence that cuttlefish employ stereopsis, but they demonstrated that cuttlefish can be trained to wear equipment and respond to virtual stimuli.”

Consider the hagfish, at length if you think you're hard enough. Choice hagfish tidbits:

Typically, a hagfish will release less than a teaspoon of gunk from the 100 or so slime glands that line its flanks. And in less than half a second, that little amount will expand by 10,000 times—enough to fill a sizable bucket.

You could inject a hagfish with an extra 40 percent of its body volume without stretching the skin.

The entire hagfish is effectively a large gut, and even that is understating matters: Their skin is actually more efficient at absorbing nutrients than their own intestines.

[Last but not least, a photo caption:] A car is covered in hagfish, and slime, after an accident on Highway 101.

Enlarged spleens and possible Denisovan genetics influence: Diving abilities of the bajau sea nomads.

I'm not saying it's the Deep Ones, but..... Did bioluminescent pyrosomes start the Vietnam War?

Film of a square-rigged ship!

News of the 21st Century: the Navy is synthesizing hagfish slime and contemplating its potential.

“From a tactical standpoint, it would be interesting to have a material that can change the properties of the water at dilute concentrations in a matter of seconds,” Ryan Kincer, a materials engineer at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Panama City Division, said in a statement.

The Navy also envisions using the material in products to protect firefighters and divers, as an anti-shark spray, and as a coating for ships to protect against algae, barnacles and other aquatic life that typically attach to them.

A biofluorescent sea turtle!

Full endothermy in a fish!

Oarfish in California!

A scale-less Antarctic fish with gin-clear blood

Images of a giant squid in its natural habitat! Who says there's no good news these days? They did it by means of near-infrared light: beautiful images of a beautiful animal, even if it's just a little one.

Shark falls from sky onto golf course

Cephalopod mimics fish, fish mimics cephalopod:

Bravura fishing skills 42,000 years ago east of Wallace's Line

The fact that one is not krill would be dubious comfort here:

Sailor eaten by Polynesian cannibal? As they say, worse things happen at sea, but we'll see how this shakes out.

HT: Adventure Blog.

Were the corpses of Nevada ichthyosaurs artistically arranged by an enormous cephalopod? No, seriously:

"It became very clear that something very odd was going on there," said McMenamin. "It was a very odd configuration of bones."

First of all, the different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the shonisaurs were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also looked like the bones had been purposefully rearranged. That it got him thinking about a particular modern predator that is known for just this sort of intelligent manipulation of bones.

"Modern octopus will do this," McMenamin said. What if there was an ancient, very large sort of octopus, like the kraken of mythology. "I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart.....

Even more creepy: The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker. In other words, the vertebral disc "pavement" seen at the state park may represent the earliest known self portrait.

I've enjoyed a couple visits to Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park over the years, but the next trip will be seriously enlivened by the possibility that it's a fossilized kraken lair.

Update: In the unlikely event the exercise is beyond any of our readers, National Geographic and Pharyngula take some Occam's razor to this story. They focus on the self-portrait idea, though, which is pretty damn out there, but don't much mention the the notion of the midden, which seems much less bonkers, even if it's not overly endowed with evidence.

A photographic treat to brighten up your day: Paul Nicklen’s gallery of leopard seals. Amazing!